One cannot overestimate the impact Plato (427-347 B.C.) has had on intellectual history, including on Christianity, which (with rare exception) has all but incarnated into doctrine one of his most influential ideas: the immortality of the soul.
His argument (through Socrates, his mouthpiece) goes roughly as follows.
First, he claimed that opposites are created by opposites. The opposite of life, he says, is death. And the opposite of death is life. “So it is from the dead,” he concludes, “that living things and people come. . . . Then our souls do exist in the next world.”1
Then, as humans, we have concepts of absolute justice, absolute good, absolute beauty, even though we have never seen absolute justice, absolute good, or absolute beauty, at least not in our physical bodies. So, he argues, we must have known these concepts in another existence, another life, and now we only recollect them. “But if the knowledge which we acquired before birth was lost by us at birth, and if afterward by the use of the senses we recovered what we previously knew, will not the process which we call learning be a recovering of the knowledge which is natural to us, and may not this be rightly termed recollection?”2 Hence, the soul must have existed prior to our birth; and if the soul existed before entering our physical bodies, it must exist afterward as well.
His next argument comes from the nature of the soul itself, which, he says, is a simple unity and, as such, is like the divine: “immortal, and intellectual, and uniform, and indissoluble, and unchangeable”3—unlike fleshly bodies, which are corruptible and dissolvable. Hence, the soul is immortal. In fact, when Socrates’ disconsolate friends asked, just before he drank the hemlock (he was facing the death penalty), how they should bury him, he responded, “Any way you like . . . . that is, if you can catch me and I don’t slip through your fingers.”4
And there you have it—the arguments behind one of the Occident’s most influential thinker’s most pervasive teaching: the immortality of the soul. Weak arguments defending truth are bad enough; in this case, it’s weak arguments defending error.
Though many biblical scholars know that Scripture teaches nothing about the soul being immortal, the news hasn’t reached the Christian masses. Too bad, because this error leaves them wide open to the horrific doctrine of eternal torment in hell for the lost; and, even worse (if there could be), to the deceptions of spiritualism, as the recent spate of I-died-and-went-to-heaven books and movies have shown.
“For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward, for the memory of them is forgotten” (Eccl. 9:5).
Unless, of course, Plato, with his hokey arguments, knew better.
1 Plato, “Phaedo,” The Last Days of Socrates (New York: Penguin Classics, 1965), p. 119.
2 “Phaedo,” The Complete Harvard Classics: The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature, e-artnow, Kindle Edition, pp. 467, 468.
3 Ibid., p. 473.
4 The Last Days of Socrates, p. 179.
